Tourist Pays $10,000 For Scotch That Was Probably Fake

Author: Frank Williams Jr.

August 15, 2017 11:16 PM

While on vacation in Switzerland, a tourist talked a bar into opening an incredibly rare bottle of Macallan Scotch. The customer was willing to pay the $10,000 to taste the .67-ounce alcohol at the Devil’s Place Whiskey Bar in St. Mortiz and liked what he drank. But now whiskey experts say the bottle was “almost certainly fake.”

When proprietor Sandro Bernasconi opened the bar’s prize possession, the ultra-rare bottle of Macallan from 1878, he was worried the cork would have fallen apart or the whiskey would be bad after all that time. But the big spender who ordered it, Chinese fantasy novelist Zhang Wei, was happy with the drink.

But once the $10,000 Macallan story got out, whiskey experts from around the world have contacted Bernasconi to say that bottle was most likely not real. Wine Searcher reports the label on the bottle claims that the whisky was distilled in 1878, was matured for 27 years, and that the whisky is “guaranteed absolutely pure by Roderick Kemp, proprietor, Macallan and Talisker Distilleries Ltd.” Unfortunately, Roderick Kemp didn’t own Macallan and Talisker at the same time and there’s no record of “Macallan and Talisker Distilleries Ltc.” ever existing.

Experts say the fake bottle probably came from a batch of fake Macallans from Italy back in the early 2000s. They were convincing knock-offs, Macallan itself even bought 100 bottles that turned out to be fake. Bernasconi is having the bottle and Scotch tested in Scotland and he says he’ll refund Zhang’s money if it was a fake.